THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  Next Harry checked the foreign liaison file, which had gotten a little fatter in the past few minutes since Marcia sent out her whip. Multiple sources were reporting that there had been some unusual gatherings in Tehran the past few days. The Turks had a source who claimed that the head of the Ministry of Intelligence had been summoned to the Supreme Leader’s compound by the national security adviser. A Mossad agent within the Syrian moukhabarat, who happened to be on a trip to Iran, reported that there was a panic within Rev Guard intelligence over the disappearance of one of their senior officers involved in security of the nuclear program. The Iranians feared that the officer had defected to Israel. No such luck, said the Mossad representative in Washington.

  The most intriguing report had come in that day from a Russian intelligence officer planted in an IAEA inspection team that was visiting Iran for yet another discussion of inspection procedures. The Russian reported that over the past twenty-four hours, access to all Iranian nuclear facilities—declared and undeclared—had been shut down. Even Iranians with normal security clearances couldn’t get into their usual workplaces, as of this morning. The IAEA team had made an urgent query to their contact on the Iranian president’s staff. And that office was in a panic, too.

  Harry felt a little of his gloom dissipate. Something bad had happened inside the Iranian nuclear program. They were trying to figure out how bad. Senior people were being summoned. Scientists’ access was blocked. Even the Iranian president was nervous. A shit storm was rising in Tehran. That was promising.

  Okay, so what did he know? What had to be true, no matter what had happened on the way to that deadly fireball across the riverbed at Kalat? He knew that even if the operation in Mashad had been a total washout, the Iranians would be scrambling. A scientist in their nuclear program was dead. By now, they would have identified Karim Molavi’s body in that burnt-out car. Probably they wouldn’t be able to identify Jackie from what was left of her body, and the identities of the other two members of the Increment team were probably covered, too, unless the Brits had been sloppy. So the Iranians wouldn’t have proof, but they were paranoid enough to guess at the truth. Their scientist had died trying to escape Iran with foreign intelligence agents. He had been recruited as a foreign spy. Everything he had touched was contaminated, and they couldn’t be sure how far the stain spread. They had to suspect that the worst had happened: their nuclear program had been penetrated.

  The Iranians would have to take action quickly. Harry knew he wouldn’t see it outright, lit up in bold. They were too careful for that. But he would see shadows, as people moved to protect other parts of the nuclear program that had suddenly come under suspicion. He would hear echoes of voices, summoning people for interrogation, calling them back from posts overseas where they were vulnerable. That was what he would look for—the aftershocks.

  Harry dug into the NSA file. The messages were queued in a way that made them hard to search, so he called in Tony Reddo, one of his smart kids, and asked him to set a filter that captured anything that involved a sudden recall of personnel or change in status within the past forty-eight hours. It didn’t work at first, but Reddo made a phone call to a friend at NSA and played around with the search parameters until he had something for Harry to look at. And you could see it, when you put in the right keywords, just looking at the list of intercepts that came up. They were pulsing their system: Frankfurt, London, Dubai, Beirut. They had code breaks for only some of the traffic, but even where they couldn’t read it in plain text, the traffic analysis suggested that key people—known members of Iran’s secret establishment—were being pulled out of their normal positions and brought home.

  On a hunch, Harry called the cybergeeks at the Counter-Terrorism Center and asked them to do a quick check of all passengers who had traveled to Tehran from Europe the past two days. Get the names and match them up with any known intelligence, security, or defense people. It came back in an hour, and it confirmed what the SIGINT had indicated—that a lot of very senior people were being called home in a hurry.

  Marcia stuck her head in the door. Harry could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. She really wasn’t supposed to do that, but it wasn’t a night in which he wanted to enforce the rules.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. “You should eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry. Go away.”

  “Tough shit, Harry. I brought you something anyway from the cafeteria. It’s not very appetizing, but that’s life.” She handed a tray through the door and dropped it on Harry’s desk. It was a bowl of pea soup and a cheeseburger. Harry ate it all, gratefully.

  What about Ashgabat? The Iranians had to be mobilizing there. They would have found the Mitsubishi van that had crashed the border, and the dead Turkman driver. They wouldn’t learn much, but they would realize that Molavi had been smuggled into the country from Turkmenistan before the botched attempt to exfiltrate him. That would scare Tehran all the more. They would pull whatever chains they had in the Turkmen capital to figure out what had gone down.

  Harry phoned the chief of the CIA’s two-person station in Ashgabat, a woman named Anita Pell. It was already early morning there, but she sounded as if she had been awakened from a deep sleep. Poor Anita. He hadn’t informed her that he had been in Turkmenistan, and he didn’t do so now. What would he tell her? He had gone there as an operative of a foreign power, Great Britain.

  Harry asked Anita Pell to call her liaison officer in the Turkmen security service, right now, and request any information they had about unusual Iranian activities the last few days.

  “And wake him up?” Anita Pell sounded shocked. Yes, Harry said, wake him up now, and go see him as soon as he’ll receive you. Send anything you get, as soon as you get it.

  Harry felt sorry for her. She had been the only officer to bid for Ashgabat when it came open last year. Her husband had run off with his secretary eight months before, so she said yes. Turkmenistan had been a nice, easy nap until this moment, when all the shit in the world had come down on her head.

  Two hours later, Harry had his Ashgabat file. The chief of the Turkmen security received Anita Pell himself—that was a first. He reported highly unusual activity at the Iranian embassy. The lights had been on all night the past two nights; the Turkmen guards posted outside said people had been coming and going constantly, and that the Iranians were burning documents inside the compound. What’s more, the Iranian consulate on the Turkmen side of the Saraghs border crossing had been working nonstop, too, and several dozen Iranian security officials with diplomatic passports had come across the border two days ago, questioning their contacts on the Turkmen side.

  “The Turkmen want to know if they can help,” Anita explained on the secure phone. “The chief was very agitated. He said something big went down on the border a couple days ago. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know anything.”

  “What’s there to know?” Harry answered sweetly.

  “Don’t humiliate me, Harry. I don’t deserve that. What’s going on?”

  “Stay tuned. It will all become clear. Either that or it won’t. But however it plays out, you’re going to need some help. I’ll send you one of my kids tomorrow.”

  Anita Pell protested that she didn’t require any assistance, thank you very much, but she sounded relieved, nonetheless, that she would be getting some.

  Harry wanted to be on the ground in Mashad. That was impossible, obviously. The CIA had precious few sources in Tehran, let alone eastern Iran. But thanks to technical coverage, he was able to get pretty close. His advantage was that he knew what to look for. He had the coordinates of the Ardebil Research Establishment, and it was easy enough for the cartographers to do a quick fix on where it was, just above the northern ring road. The imagery was there—the satellites made their passes over Iran every day like clockwork, so that there was near-constant coverage, and every digital transmission lived forever in the magic archive. You could play back reality as if it were on tape.
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  The National Reconnaissance Office maintained an ops center at Langley for agency officers who wanted to look at the world on rewind. Marcia had phoned the technicians a few hours before and made a special request. They were grumpy and hard to deal with, but so was Marcia. She gave the techs Harry’s search parameters. When they were ready, she called Harry and toddled off with him to a distant room in the new wing, out by the Brown and Yellow parking lots.

  “Don’t be a jerk with these people, Harry,” Marcia said as they made the long walk to the NRO ops center. “They are doing you a favor. People still do that. Even here.”

  “I am a jerk,” said Harry. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Harry had the NRO techs dial back to the time Karim was supposed to have left the research center in Mashad, about four in the afternoon. The daylight cameras were still working, so the resolution was good. It took a few minutes, but Harry finally identified the Mitsubishi waiting outside. In the imagery of the Ardebil employees departing the lab, Harry saw what he thought was Karim, leaving with someone who had to be his friend Reza.

  It was all there in digital memory, like a playback of life. Harry watched Reza’s Peugeot head south to the restaurant; he saw the Mitsubishi tagging behind, too. He sped the images ahead while Karim and Reza were in the restaurant, and then resumed the visual narrative when Reza’s Peugeot was driving north again, once more followed by the Mitsubishi van.

  The two cars headed toward the hills above the city, slowly winding through traffic and taking the main road toward Tus, until Reza’s Peugeot turned into the drive of what must be his home, followed thirty seconds later by the Mitsubishi van. Karim led Reza up to the front door of his villa, and then inside. A bit later, a lithe figure that had to be Jackie went into the house with a second operative, leaving behind the third man, it looked like Hakim, to keep watch outside.

  And then it all went haywire: a black sedan pulled into the drive; you didn’t see it at first, because it wasn’t showing any headlights. The first sign was the bright spark of a weapon being fired, and then the dreadful sight of Hakim falling, shooting as he went down. Night had fallen now, and the infrared images were harder to read, but you could see enough to understand what had happened. The shooter got out of the black sedan and swiftly executed the poor Turkmen smuggler who had been unlucky enough to be hired for this pilgrim journey. Then the shooter stutter-stepped to the villa, followed by a second man.

  Who were they? What had brought them to this place? Had the Iranians been following Karim all along, with Harry too blind to see their footprints?

  The two mystery men entered the villa by a different entrance from the one the others had used. A half minute later, there was a flash of light from the building, as if something had exploded inside, and later more sparks of light, as if from gunshots. Harry kept muttering to himself as he watched the play unfold. It was horrifying to witness these events after the fact without being able to affect them, or to understand fully what was happening.

  Eventually two figures emerged from the villa. One looked to be Jackie, dressed in her chador, and the other was surely Karim. Had Jackie shot her way out? What had happened to the other people inside? And then a third man emerged, following them—but no, he was leading them toward his black sedan.

  It was the shooter, the gimpy man who had killed Hakim and executed the Turkmen driver. He prodded Jackie and Karim toward the sedan and waved them inside. He spoke a word to the driver, and then the black sedan was gone—beginning its journey to the border at Kalat, Harry knew. And the lone man, the shooter, was left there with what had to be four dead bodies.

  “Who the fuck is that guy?” muttered Harry. He was speaking to himself. And in truth, he thought he knew the answer. But it was Marcia Hill who answered.

  “That’s Al-Majnoun,” said Marcia. “The Crazy One.”

  Marcia didn’t want to talk about it in front of the NRO techs. She was strange that way. After a career at the CIA, she didn’t really trust anyone, least of all other members of the U.S. intelligence community. So she waited until they were safely back in Persia House before she said any more. She padded to her cubicle and returned with a file folder and a pack of cigarettes.

  “Give me one,” he said.

  “But you don’t smoke, Harry.”

  “I just started. Now tell me about Al-Majnoun.”

  Marcia took a photograph out of the folder. It was a grainy shot of a man whose face looked like it had been drawn with a haphazard Etch A Sketch.

  “This is Al-Majnoun,” she said. “I know it’s a crappy picture, but it’s the best one we have of him, version 2.0, or 3.0, or whatever this is.”

  She removed a second photograph from the folder. It showed a younger man, someone who, from the image in the photograph, appeared to be entirely different from the dark and disfigured man in the first shot.

  “This is Al-Majnoun, version 1.0. Or at least that’s what some of my Israeli friends think. These are their photographs. His name back then in Lebanon was Kamal Hussein Sadr. He was one of the first people the Iranians pulled into what became Hezbollah. He was a wholly owned subsidiary of Iranian intelligence, from the start. They used him as an enforcer. When they didn’t trust one of their own people, he took care of it.”

  “Why don’t we know about him?”

  “Because he was killed, supposedly. In 1985, by the Israelis. They were patting themselves on the back for months. Car bomb, body blown to bits in Baalbek so they couldn’t ID him afterward. But seriously dead, everyone thought. So everyone forgot about him. Except for a few skeptical SOBs at Mossad. And me.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went to Iran. In 1985, after the Israeli hit that almost got him. Personal invitation of Khomeini. So it was said, if anyone bothered to listen to the chatter, which no one did because the Israelis had killed him and the Israelis never make mistakes. But he was there. He knew he would need a new face if he was going to stay undead. So the surgeon’s healing arts were applied. They put so much new skin on this guy, they probably gave him a new dick, too.”

  “Get a life, Marcia.”

  “Bit late for that. Anyway, when you run the traces—meaning Marcia’s private traces, because honestly, honey, the main registry is useless—what you find is that Mr. Majnoun kept doing special jobs. Super Wet Work. When a dissident faction surfaced in the Rev Guard in the early nineties and people got revolverized, guess who pulled the trigger? When Rafsanjani had a problem with the Ministry of Intelligence and a few people got knocked off, who got the call?”

  “The Crazy One.”

  “But of course. He was the cleanup guy. Nobody owned him, you see, except the Leader’s office. And check this out.”

  She took a third photograph from her file. It showed a tidy little man with a neat beard standing in front of an airplane. In the shadows behind him was a man in sunglasses, with the Identi-Kit face.

  “This is the president getting off a plane in Damascus. Secret trip, never announced. The Israelis got the picture. The official Mossad line was that the messed-up-looking guy in the shades was just some fixer who was traveling with the president. But my pals down in the boiler room in Tel Aviv knew better. This is Al-Majnoun. The Leader’s personal enforcer. The man who doesn’t exist. And, I am sorry to say, the man who took down your operation.”

  “You are one crazy old bitch.” Harry leaned across the table and kissed her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “But you’re wrong about one thing. I don’t think Al-Majnoun ran this Mashad operation for the Leader of Iran. He did it for someone else.”

  Harry had a last, agonizing piece of the puzzle, and he didn’t understand it until after midnight, when he was about ready to go home. The remaining mystery was the identity of the second man who had entered the villa with Al-Majnoun but had never left. He appeared to be the shooter’s accomplice, but who was he? Was he also part of a secret cell, operating under the protection of t
he Leader? Or did he represent other parts of the Iranian secret world?

  An answer surfaced in urgent liaison reports that arrived from two friendly services that had been apprised of Langley’s hunger for fresh rumint about anything involving Iranian intelligence.

  The first was from the little spy service of Azerbaijan, which had a surprisingly good network, thanks to the large Azeri community in Iran. The cable from Baku reported that senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service had been spotted the day before at the funeral of one of their colleagues—a certain Mehdi Esfahani, who was said to have been a senior investigator with responsibility for security at some of the covert facilities of the Iranian nuclear program. There had been a long reception afterward, at the family’s home. The talk was that Esfahani had died in Mashad—the body had been flown back home in great secrecy, and that it had been riddled with bullet holes. The family had been told he died a hero’s death, and a special martyr’s pension had been approved.

  The second overnight report was from French intelligence. It, too, had a few long-standing sources within Iranian intelligence. The head of the French service, a contact of Harry’s since they had been in Beirut together years ago, made a point of calling himself, even though it was just past seven in the morning in Paris. He said he was transmitting a flash cable that might be of interest to his old friend Har-ry Pap-pas. And indeed it was.